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Why So Few Women Are in the Boardroom
The Real Reason So Few Women are in the
Boardroom
On average, women are rated as slightly better
managers than men. Also, women better understand
the female consumer’s mindset. That’s
important because women make most purchases. So why
are only 11% of Fortune-500 senior executives
women?
The standard answer is “glass
ceiling,” a term that evokes the image of a
cabal of top male executives scheming to preserve
an old boy’s club.
While vestiges of old-boy hiring may remain,
most top executives at Fortune 500 companies are
too worried about the bottom line to let any clubby
cravings affect who they hire as senior
executives.
The primary reason for the 11% figure is that
men, on average, are willing to devote more time to
their career. And time it takes. A study conducted
by The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs,
found that the average CEO works 58 hours per week.
Fortune 500 CEOs likely work even more.
Unlike in typical media portrayals, few male
senior executives spend much time hang-gliding. In
the real world, here’s how it more often plays
out, as reported to me by my many clients who are
male senior executives. Their exercise is more
likely to be on a treadmill while doing
professional reading. If he’s married, when
wife urges him to do more of the domestic chores
and parenting, he is likely to say something like,
“I want to rise to the top and you want me to,
too. I like my work and you like our lifestyle.
That requires lots of evenings and weekends. I
spend as much time with the family as I
can.”
Most women make different choices. The October
10, 2004 lead story on 60 Minutes and the September
2003 New York Times Magazine story documented that
a majority even of Ivy- and Stanford-educated
female alumni did not work full time. Harvard
Business School reports that only 38% of its female
MBA graduates, during their childbearing years,
work full-time.
Dr. Warren Farrell, author of the forthcoming
book, Why Men Earn More (Amacom, 2005) found that a
key reason men earn more than women is
number-of-hours worked. In addition to providing
abundant statistics, he interviewed a number of
successful senior executive women. Each one stated
that crucial to their success was their willingness
to work longer than most women are. For
example,
When I interviewed Lillian Vernon, (of Lillian
Vernon Corporation), she said, “Many people
who dream about their own businesses and don’t
have one, are not prepared to work that
hard—to think about their job while
they’re getting dressed, showering, waiting
for somebody— to think of every minute as an
opportunity.”
Theresa Metty, senior VP at Motorola agreed,
“Successful people don’t see after-hour
‘demands’ as demands, but as
opportunities. The opportunity to surprise, invent,
create…”
All this doesn’t surprise me. Having been
career coach to 2,000 professional clients, 2/3
female, I know that more women than men prioritize
work/life balance, wanting more time for family,
home, friends, and recreation.
In the privacy of my office, many capable,
highly educated women who, in public, may mouth
politically correct mantras decrying the dearth of
women in the boardroom, admit that what they’d
really like is to work part-time if at all, and
only on a pleasant job, so they can have ample time
for home, family, friends, etc. Far fewer women
than men are willing to work 58+ hours a week and
to take work home or do extensive after-work
professional development activities during evenings
and weekends.
Steven Rhoades, author of the new book, Taking
Sex Differences Seriously, cites study after study
indicating that the main reason most women want
ample family time is their biological drive to have
children and be the primary family caregiver.
Feminist activists argue that is social
conditioning by “the male hegemony.” But
if that were true, then why do women take on most
family caregiving in every society from Iceland to
New Guinea, in every era from ancient times to
today, and in all political contexts from communist
to capitalist? Women’s desire to prioritize
family caregiving is mainly biological
predisposition, not cultural brainwashing.
Some women argue that it’s men’s fault
that women don’t spend more time at work. For
example, Career Journal senior correspondent Perri
Capell wrote, “If more women had men at home
doing for them what women traditionally do for men,
they might be able to stay at the office
longer.”
Fact is, many women don’t do it for men.
They do it for themselves. On average, it is women,
more than men, who want to have children. So it is
unfair of them to insist that the men share heavily
in the child rearing.
It is the woman, on average, who cares more
about having lots of time with children (And the
data doesn't support the importance of that--after
controlling for socioeconomic status, quantity of
time matters little. Quality of time does). Even
many wealthy women, who could afford and have
access to high-quality child care, choose to forego
that so they can be with their children. If
quantity of family time matters more to women, it
is unfair for them to impose that value on their
husbands.
And regarding domestic chores, most men aren't
as concerned about a tastefully decorated and
sparkling clean home. On average, women care more
about this.
It is unfair for women to force men to spend
time on what the woman wants. If a man were to
insist that a woman devote equal time to the things
he cares about--for example, financial and tax
issues, that fix-it/build-it project, or playing
basketball, most people would think that unfair,
selfish. Yet when women do it, we’re expected
to consider it reasonable.
I predict that if women--before they got
married--informed their career-minded future
husbands that they insist he fully share domestic
and child-rearing responsibilities and that they
don’t expect to earn much money, many men
would decide it isn't worth getting married. So,
most women withhold those demands until
afterwards.
A 2004 study by Catalyst, a women’s
advocacy organization, found that women aspire to
senior executive positions at the same rate as men.
But a woman (or a man) can’t have it both
ways. If she wants a moderate workweek, for the
reasons I will outline below, she cannot
fair-mindedly aspire to the boardroom.
Corporations, governments, and non-profits need
plenty of good 20 to 40 hour-a-week workers, but
not in the top spots. Here’s why.
Imagine you were the CEO of a company and were
considering two employees for a senior position.
Candidate A had—over her or his 20-year
career--worked 50 to 60 hours a week, and in spare
time, made great efforts to keep upgrading skills.
Meanwhile, Candidate B worked 40 hours a week, and
in spare time, focused on family, home, friends,
and recreation, and had taken years off to raise
children—thereby losing professional contacts
and currency with the latest information and
technology. You’d almost certainly hire
Candidate A. Fact is, more men than women are like
Candidate A. That, and not a sexist glass ceiling,
is the main reason why women represent only 11% of
senior executives in Fortune 500 companies.
But let’s say that you, the CEO, did what
feminist activists advocate: install a
family-friendly workplace that prioritizes
work-life balance, and hired many women who had
worked only 40 hours a week and taken years off to
raise children. You might hire lots of people like
Candidate B. If so, your company would likely go
out of business.
Here’s why. Your competitors would hire
lots of Candidate A’s. That would result not
only in those senior executives--the company’s
more important people--being more productive, but
their supervisees too. Dedicated, passionate
leadership is infectious.
A company with such committed employees is an
exciting, passion-filled place. The argument that
working more than 40 hours a week is ineffective
and leads to burnout is not true. What leads to
burnout is meaningless or too difficult work in a
passionless workplace, not additional hours of
meaningful, doable work in a passionate
environment. Some of the most alive people I know
work long hours. The argument that working more
than 40 hours a week leads to burnout is
unsupported by sound research. Such rhetoric is a
shoot-from-the-hip pitch that feminist advocates
use to sell work-life balance to employers. We all
know how being around dedicated people makes us
more energized, not less.
A workplace with long, hard-working passionate
people results in the company’s products being
better or more cost-effective, which makes
thousands of people--the customers--happier.
Aren’t you grateful when your home, TV, car,
etc., is wonderful, reliable, and didn’t cost
too much? Creating excellent products, in turn,
causes a company’s profits to grow, which
allows the company to invest in more innovation,
provides money to the thousands of shareholders who
entrusted their savings to the company, and
increases the sense of pride and passion among the
company’s employees.
Meanwhile, your employees, mostly Candidate Bs,
zealots for work-life balance, in the short-run,
will appreciate being able to leave work earlier
than workers at your competitors’ companies.
When, in the middle of a brainstorming meeting,
someone says, “Sorry, I have a parent-teacher
conference. I have to leave,” and you say,
“Fine,” everyone will smile at how
family-friendly their workplace is. But inside,
those with passion about their work will feel that
passion just slightly diminished. Each such
event—for example, every time an employee
takes advantage of the Family Leave Act--
diminishes your workplace’s passion just a
little more. A number of your employees, who had
taken years off to raise a family, are less
up-to-date and lack current professional contacts.
In the intermediate term, your employees will be
working for a company in decline because their
competitors, filled with more passionate,
dedicated, more knowledgeable, better connected
employees, are producing a better product. And in
the long-term, such companies are far more likely
to go out of business, leaving your boardroom with
0 percent women and 0 percent men.
The media’s headline message is, “Hire
more women and make the workplaces more
family-friendly. Stop demanding that executives
work 50 to 60 hours a week. Be more like France
that mandates a 35-hour average workweek.” The
media is far less eager to trumpet the fact that
despite France having a better educated population
and 35-hour work week, its unemployment rate is
more than twice the US rate and there’s talk
of changing the law. Advocating
“family-friendly, work-life balance”
workplaces will likely create different headlines a
few years from now: “More jobs offshored to
India. “More companies open new facilities in
China.” “Unemployment soars.”
For the reasons stated at the outset, if I were
a CEO, I would certainly want to hire women in
senior positions, but only those with a proven
track record of having put in long hours at work
and in professional development, and who could be
counted on to continue doing so. Those are the same
criteria I would use to evaluate male
candidates.
Women, if you want to be considered for the
boardroom, it doesn’t cut it to say
you’re working smart so you needn’t work
long hours. There are plenty of men competing for
those slots who work both long and smart. You
can’t have it both ways: either plan on
working long and smart or accept a lower-level job
in exchange for work/life balance.
There would be plenty of room in my company for
women and men who want to work a moderate workweek,
but not at the top. I don’t care whether my
executives have a y chromosome, but I want their
priority not to be work-life balance, but rather,
helping my company to ethically develop the best
products in the world.
© 2007, Marty
Nemko
* * *
Marty
Nemko holds a PhD from the University of
California, Berkeley, and subsequently taught in
Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He is
the worklife columnist in the Sunday San Francisco
Chronicle and is the producer and host of Work With
Marty Nemko, heard Sundays at 11 on 91.7 FM in
(NPR, San Francisco), and worldwide on
www.martynemko.com
 .
400+ of his published writings are available free
on that website and is a co-editor of
Cool
Careers for Dummies.
and author of The All-in-One College Guide.
E-Mail.
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